Crushing Prison
by skcm
Summary: Ama Surana is lost in a childish dream world where fantasy and reality mingle together in a hazy wildfire. Can she silence her own monologue for the greater good of Ferelden, or is she doomed to paint the battlefield red with her mistakes?


A/N: Thanks to wives for epic hand-holding.

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Morning/Mourning

The room's dark but I flicker with heated sparks, an angry candle, a lit fuse, a fireball. I touch his hand before he can even see me. He doesn't move a muscle. Whispering his name hard into his cheek, he wakes with a startled look and then an easy smile. Then he touches me back. We make love in the pitch black space, unaware and mutually forgivng, though maybe it _was_ envy that drove me into his quarters the night before my Harrowing. Desperation or something, I guess. It doesn't matter though because it's done and we're invisible to each other now. His coddling kisses and my muffled shrieks and groans swirl into nothingness, a veritable dream world of used-to-be.

And yet, he is there when I wake up. Jowan's voice is strained and ragged like a sunken moth's last mournful backstroke across a basin of fetid water. I taste the scheme in the pitiful utterances of _Please, Ama,_ and words like _trust, friend, life, love_. They hold meaning, for him. I want to hold him, square and stubbly chin solid, upward. _Friend_. Jowan is my friend. I trust him. His magic doesn't hold a torch to my own. Irving likes me more. _Jowan_ likes me more. It is a lie.

But I need to place him in the sunlight, turn his face out to see the world and tell him it's okay. I don't. I do what's bad for him. I am an enabler, alone now without a best friend and without a sometimes-lover, without sheets crumpled at clammy ankles and curling toes and that still morning before my fleeting moments as a real mage. As for the two of us, we trudge our own courses, bravely opposed to destiny.

Destiny smells like wet dog when my idealism slinks into the corner, and I see things checkered dark and ominous. This blight is an opportunity, though. Like Al says, _bringing people together_. I like to add that they might not want to be brought together. He'll learn too, I think. I also think he'll learn to like me...to care for more than a shared glance because even though Morrigan is not the most vibrantly social creature that spider thing she does is impressive, but Morrigan and I laugh at times. He's sad though, the saddest eyes I've seen since my mother left and I looked into the mirror with my own brown eyes and found only dirt and sour remains. Once at camp, I looked at him a little while he was asleep. He was curled into a ball like he was striving for warmth. Or comfort.

I tell Morrigan a story on the road out of the Wilds. She laughs this time, because it's all about magic. A spectacle I liked to put on as a child, the smoky cremation of the various ill-fated animals we found in our travels along trade roads before I went to the Circle. They'd been hit by carts, pummeled by boots or trod upon by horse hooves, but I felt bad. I burned them in my own private showing. No longer stiff or dirty, they met with the sky in a hazy cloud.

Maybe the Maker was looking, but it still felt like only I was there.

Alistair shudders at the thought of my magic being used _outside_. He misses Duncan so hard, and I can tell. I know that despair. I shake him, abruptly, to get his attention. It's out of place. When I ask, he tells me I don't have to, I didn't really _know_ him very long, it doesn't very well matter, he's sorry. He's got to try as hard as me at this, or I'm just gonna give up. But Maker, his hazel eyes are entrancing like what you can't reach. There is some mystery to this, with an ever unmet, ever tantalizing conclusion.

Take me in your arms, I urge him, with a gaze that _must_ get the point across. Then he darts across the small tavern because the last block of cheese in all of Lothering entices him. I turn to Leliana with a frown. She is perceptive. She _knows_, or perhaps I am naked and she's actually giggling at that oddly-placed freckle, the one under my left breast.

When I am awake again, he is hovering like a makeshift tent over me, then back to the fire, then to Mongrel. Briefly, he looks at Morrigan's ramshackle sleeping area. We talk about my dreams, which he keeps calling nightmares like they're really that bad. I mention that the Fade is a treacherous place, regardless of whether or not there are darkspawn yelling at me the whole time, and he shrugs. _Thank you, though, for warning me,_ I want to say like an obedient and precious child, but instead I snap in two and ask him politely to let me sleep longer. I sit up in the tent and pretend with myself that I'm having a nightmare, while I anxiously ponder how I could have done better.

_Join me, Alistair, in my tent, right now, because your hair is so nice._ I sleep well past sunrise.


End file.
